A girl named Toni
She’s the ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent. Toni Collette has achieved a success most actors would envy, and having overcome panic attacks and bulimia, she is the happiest that she’s ever been.
It was panic attacks that saved Toni Collette’s life. To the outside world, she was the funny, bubbly Australian with the searchlight smile; a girl from Blacktown, NSW, who had added an extra “e” to her surname of Collett and, armed with a chameleon-like talent, had become an overnight sensation in Muriel’s Wedding in 1994. Yet, while Toni was building a formidable body of work and plaudits from critics and fans, inside she was a young woman struggling to come to terms with sudden fame and in the grip of bulimia, after having to gain and then lose weight rapidly for roles, andstruggling with the heartache of a broken romance. Then it happened. “I had my first panic attack,” she says, softly. “I thought I was dying and I realised that life was important. I realised I could use my life to benefit not only myself, but other people, too. It was the appreciation of what life was, and that overwhelming sense of what I had.” Today, Toni grimaces when she remembers those dark days. “It was when I was young and inexperienced, learning the ropes and figuring out how I fitted in,” she says. “I know it’s a cliché, but with any experience, you get through it any way you can. It’s not until afterwards that you realise how intense the experience was. Now, I’m thankful. It’s those experiences – some wonderful, some bad – that are what, in a way, make you what you are. I don’t know if they make you stronger, but I think ‘they make you more aware, which is a strength in itself. It gives you the power to nip problems in the bud.”
Toni, 29, is in Sydney on the eve of the release of her latest movie, the Australian comedy Dirty Deeds. She’s talking about her move back home from the frenzy of Hollywood, the new man in her life, how her brother’s first child is reminding her how much she wants kids of her own, and the next phase of her stellar career. On that, at least, everyone seems certain. she can’t put a foot wrong. Bryan Brown, Dirty Deeds’ producer and co-star, was blown away by Toni’s performance. “I’ve always thought she was very, very good, but when you work with her you realise how amazing she is,” he says. “She’s an extraordinarily talented actress. You never see her [overjacting in a role; you never see her acting. She just becomes comfortable in that person’s skin. She makes it look so deceptively easy.” That’s been happening pretty much since Toni first stepped on stage at the age of 14, in a school production of Godspell, and knew immediately that was the release she’d been looking for all her life. “It was like St Paul on the road to Damascus,” says her former drama teacher at Blacktown Girls’ High School in Sydney’s west, Joanne Nibbs, where Toni was voted the class of 1988’s most likely to succeed. Toni left school at 16, to study acting full-time at NIDA (the National Institute of Dramatic Art), but was only halfway through the course when she was plucked out to appear in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya, then offered a part opposite Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe in the 1991 movie Spotswood. She left studying to act, supporting herself between roles by delivering pizza. Her parents, truck driver Bob and courier firm worker Judy, who still live in the same home in Blacktown, weren’t surprised.
At 11, Toni, the eldest of their three children, with brothers Christopher, now 26, and Ben, 22, had fooled them intobelievingshehadappendicitis when she wanted the day off school. Indeed, she made such a good job of her deception that she even convinced doctors and underwent unnecessary surgery, leaving the hospital doctor baffled as to why it wasn’t infected when she’d obviously been in such pain. In 1994, however, after the massive success of and her Golden Globe nomination for Muriel’s Wedding had thrust Toni into the international limelight, she found it hard to cope with the roller-coaster of fame and pressure. “Look, you flail and mess up throughout your 20s,” is how she recently described that time. It was then that she developed bulimia, the devastating binge-and-purge cycle. The eating disorder, which numerous actresses, including Jane Fonda, have endured, began as Toni struggled to rid herself of the 18-plus kilograms she’d put on in seven weeks to play Muriel, and be slim enough for the demands of Hollywood. “The bulimia went on over a few years, but it isn’t a rational thing,” she says today. “You can’t break it until you’re ready. It was an internal feeling. You can’t explain what’s going on in your heart and your head My early 20s were a time of tumultuous change.”
In 1998, she split up with her boyfriend, Velvet Goldmine co-star Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and hit crisis point. Going for a drive with her brother Christopher, she had her first panic attack and, as she struggled to breathe through the pain of what felt like a heart attack, she drought she was dying. Toni has described the terrifying experience as “like losing my mind. My whole life came to sit on my lap. “We got in the car and put Bob Dylan on the CD player and I looked at Christopher and said, ‘Isn’t this great?’. Then I remember looking around and it suddenly happened. My vision started going and I felt like I was melting. It was very trippy and frightening. I actually thought I was going to die.” The experience shocked her into re-evaluating her life and seeking professional help for the bulimia that could have destroyed her. While panic at tacks continued for the next eight months, she finally emerged stronger and more focused than ever. “In my late 20s, things have presented themselves with a certain clarity,” she says. “The wiser you grow to be, the less external things affect you.” The smile, when it comes, with those famously crooked teeth, is pure 100-watt brilliance. “Yes,” she says, “I’m pretty much the happiest I’ve ever been. In the past, I’ve experienced happiness quite fleetingly, but now it’s much more constant. I’m content. And I think happiness is infectious.” The reasons are less to do with her rash of acting triumphs, such as the wide acclaim for The Boys (1997), Lilian’s Story (1995), Emma (1996) and Velvet Goldmine (1998), her Oscar nomination for The Sixth Sense (1999), and her Tony nomination last year for her Broadway debut in The Wild Party, alongside Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt. Instead, they’re rather more to do with Toni’s decision last year to simply come home for a while. Far the past 10 years, she’d been racing around the world making movies almost back-to-back. The film she worked on last year, About A Boy, had been made in cold, dark, wintry London, where she’d played a depressed, suicidal young mum who spent every day in tears.
By the end of it, Toni knew she desperately needed a break. So she headed back to Australia and, here, everything fell beautifully into place. Last year, she bought a three-bedroom house overlooking the ocean near Bondi in Sydney. She spent time back home with her family and her niece, five-week-old Miah, her brother Christopher’s new daughter. She took a role in Dirty Deeds – and she fell head•over•heels in love. “It was almost like I had to stop my life to give someone else time to enter,” says Toni, beaming, her peroxide-white hair cut fashionably short, framing those intense blue eyes. “It was a great time to come back to Australia, although maybe I could have come back earlier. We met here last year – and he’s fantastic!” The man is Dave Galafassi, 24, the drummer in the rising Sydney band Gelbison. Toni went along with friends to the launch of their first EP in October last year, intending to stay 10 minutes, and the pair have been inseparable ever since. She’s even sung backing vocals on one of the band’s songs, and now he’s set to play on an album she’s working on for herself. As for marriage, she’s still coy, but “yes, I definitely want to have kids,” she confesses, “when the time is right. But I don’t know if I believe in marriage. I think the weight of someone’s vows, when they decide to get married, has become so flimsy. It’s an odd phenomenon of the age. We have no blacksmiths any more, or carpenters working for weeks to make a chair or table. We have everything slapped together by machines. There’s no time taken on anything, Well, I believe that relationships take time. That’s how we both are.” She’s also had time to rediscover her love of acting.
She’d been working so hard she was beginning to resent all the time spent on movie sets. When she returned to Australia, however, she took a role in Dirty Deeds, a talc of the gangs that ran the prostitutes, casinos and poker machines in late-’60s Sydney, and the first movie to be distributed by the Nine Network. “I’d been moving around and living out of suitcases, and suddenly I1 had my own home and was working with people who spoke the same language, had the same sense of humour,” says Toni. “I learnt all about beingAustralian again, telling Australian stories and being in the kind of energetic atmosphere that Australians create. It was wonderful. I’ve never laughed so much in my life.” Dirty Deeds, which is scheduled to open on July 18, was directed by Mullet’s David Caesar and filmed around Sydney’s Rings Cross and Broken Hill, NSW. It is based on a real-life event in 1969 when, with the fighting in Vietnam still raging, a couple of Chicago mafia men arrived in town to stake their claim for a cut of the illegal profiteering. Bryan Brown plays Barry Ryan, the brutish hard man who runs the dodgy end of town, American John Goodman is one of the visiting mafia, Sam Neill is the corrupt police officer and Toni plays Bryan’s wife, Sharon, his strawberry blonde, feisty, gum-chewing muse. There’ll be more acclaim for Toni, too, when About A Boy comes out next month. In the British film adaptation of the Nick Homby novel, she plays opposite Hugh Grant. On the film’srelease in the UK, it went straight to number one and was dubbed one of the best comedies of the year. “I think I’m lucky in that somehow I seem to have created a career where I’m not cast or judged on the way I look” Toni says. “Because my career isn’t based on physical appearance, I don’t feel I have to go hell for leather now. I’ll be able to survive as a 70-year-old. “And now I know I could die tomorrow, so I’d rather enjoy my days now.”
Dirty Deeds opens nationally on July 18
